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Just did the bit under the basin area tonight. Buttered the tiles. Felt "better" laying them. Also a couple under the wc with last of the muck: Found a method to get shot of the excess adhesive too. I laid all the tiles with spacers. Then removed them and wiped the faces with a sponge. Used a 1" paintbrush in the joints to get rid of the excess. Another go over with the sponge and then put the spacers back in. Used a 4' Stabila level and "knees" to level across them.

We have also bought Elfa from "aplaceforeverything" with no problems. We first bought some back in 1998 from Homebase and it's still a good as new.

My system is based on the old cells, UniQ equivalent would be 4 x UniQ HW6 (2 with PCM58 and 2 with PCM34). They are wired in Parallel to give higher flow (ie 2 x PCM34 in parallel, followed by 2 x PCM58 in parallel) so parallel (same PCM) and series (PCM34-58). The ASHP heats the PCM34's (low pressure circuit) and the UFH takes heat from the same. The PCM58's are heated by a boiler (may change in due course) (low pressure circuit). DHW is parallel into High pressure circuit (PCM 34) followed by (series) parallel into the 2xPCM58 high pressure circuit. There is a tap off at the interface for the DHW mixing valve to mix the Hot from the PCM58 with warm from PCM34 to give distribution water temperature, also the circulation system returns to this point. We have 5 showers and 2 baths. Though the showers are Hansgrohe ecoflow (9 l/m), we have a Rainmaker Select 460 2 jet with a hand shower and a highflow valve so I can select 2x overhead jets and the hand shower all at 9 l/m each = 27 l/m and the system easily copes (though officially it is a 9 l/m shower). Our house is just over 400m2 and PH standard (not certified). As @Nickfromwales say DHW is the key, heating an aside and just taken from the preheat system. My cooling does work and has been kicking in, though it takes all day for the house to heat up and it is in the evening when cooking that the greatest effect is, cooling then starts to kick in, as night comes in and the outside temp drops the MVHR goes into bypass and helps cool the house down so by morning it was back to normal. I had the cooling set not to come on until above 24 and it would only kick in in the evening when we were all home and cooking. By morning the house would have cooled back to 23ish, mostly based on MVHR bypass as the cooling will shut down below 24 (as currently set).

We used ideal work for ours, it has been down two years and still looks great, cost fully installed was around £75m2, https://www.idealworkuk.com/

Cladding now installed on the utility and porch. Unfortunately, the rest of the cladding will need to wait until the start of the block work starts in a month or so. I have also been busy nailing away and fixing what felt like a million truss clips.

Let's start with the problem. I can't solve it today as today is a public holiday in RoI and the MBC guy I need to speak to isn't available, so there's nothing doing until tomorrow. I need to get the scaffolding sorted for when the timber frame team arrive on 27th August and thought I had this well in hand. I sort of still do, but there's a H&S problem with the scaffold erection and I've spent a little time this morning tracing back to the source of the error. I need a single lift of scaffolding for the construction of the attached single storey flat roof garage that is at the north east corner of the building. On the topographical survey that was done for the property by the vendor (for the planning permission that he sold it with), some overhead power cables are shown nearby and the building was designed so that the far corner of the garage cleared these. So far so good. All the setting out and construction has been done according to this. Now, lack of observation on my part, but it is now obvious that instead of clearing the north east corner of the garage by a couple of metres, the OH cables are, in fact, directly overhead of that corner and where the scaffolding would be. I had a look on the topo survey and the OH cables are incorrectly plotted - they are shown further out than they are in reality, so I'm not sure if this is collective responsibility, or who's it is. I'm not really interested in attributing blame to anyone at this stage, I'd rather just find a solution that gets the house and garage built within the current schedule. The issue is this - the cables are high tension and the scaffolder's original suggestion has proved to be a no-goer as the DNO has said that the cables are very high voltage and would just burn through any shrouding. Alternatively, they could switch off the supply running through these cables, but it would have to be for the entire time that the scaffolding is in place. I didn't even bother asking for a price on this as it's probably more than the build cost. Where do I go from here? Well, I need to speak with MBC tomorrow and find out if the garage can be built without scaffolding, or if there is some other way around this. Although all access and materials are coming in away from the OH cables, the concern for the scaffolders is if they make contact with a pole whilst putting the stuff up, or if the power arcs down to one being waved in the air. I have no idea of the likelihood of any of this, but I really wouldn't want to be responsible for an impromptu barbeque. Of a person. Update to follow. And so onto EPS and beams. I have to say that all that EPS on a sunny day is enough to burn your retinas out. It really is quite painful to look at, even when you're trying not to, and it doesn't do much for the already hot temperatures out there on site. You know it's serious when your construction workers are all wearing sunnies, as they're not a vain bunch. The trestles you can see are what they use to rest the rebar sections on before sliding on the steel rings then tying it together with wire before putting in situ and adding the rest of the rings. The blue polythene that you can see is the DPM/radon barrier sheet. This is the head of the pile that was previously cut to height. A hole is sawn through the EPS for the pile head to extend into, then the steels from the piles are bent over so that they can be lapped with the rebar forming the ring beam. Fruit pastilles are optional. The steel protrusions lapping over the EPS will get tied into steel mesh, and the two will overlap by at least 500mm. The channels in the EPS are where other beams will go. The EPS offcuts are just being used as spacers to keep the sheets that are down in the right place. Here, you can see where the steels from the pile are tied into the ring beam. Bear in mind that every single bit of wire that you can see is twisted on by hand. It makes my hands hurt just thinking about it. In the main open plan living room area, the west and north facing aspects both have lift and slide doors that need to be recessed into the floor so that the threshold is level. To allow for this, there are indents in the perimeter beams where the windows will go. This is the westward facing window; you can see that the building is oriented just over 10 degrees off the main compass points by the fall of my shadow - the photo was taken about 9.30 this morning. And one more photo of the pile steel lapped with the ring beam. The rest of the steels will take all of today and all of tomorrow, then there is the UFH pipe to be laid. Once all the steels are done, the building control bod needs to come and check that he's happy with all the tying in. Once that's okayed, then the concrete can be ordered and poured. I'm hoping it will be Thursday as we're due some rain at the weekend, by which time, I'll hopefully have some progress on my scaffolding problem.

Yup. A LOT more. Porcelain is average 0.05% porosity, so basically waterproof. Add tanking into the mix and you can have some really extended set times If you put any Mayonnaise like substance in there I'll flip. Just carry on as you are its fine without any admixes

I had a quote from one company that offered me ‘free’ appliances. Like @NSS I didnt use them as they were way more expensive overall than other quotes.

It doesn't sound like the OP has got as far as costings yet so there has been little planning done at all apart from possibly working out the top limit of what they can afford. It's no more than that just now, a maximum budget. It doesn't mean that's what the yet to be decided budget will be set at so let us wait until the OP has started some more detailed costings before telling them their plan needs adjusting.

We had a quote from one supplier who quite literally loaded all the appliance costs (circa £5k worth) onto the cabinet prices and listed the appliances as foc as they knew we wouldn’t be able to reclaim the vat. We didn’t go with them though as their price was circa £6k more than the route we went, even allowing for the vat saving.

Justifiable on his timescales TBH

That's pretty good. Mine cost me £1200 9 years ago. Some people have had quotes more than 10 x that amount. Mostly because the nearby supply has been at capacity so they need to pay for new provision to be made. So that is what to get them to confirm; that there is spare capacity within the existing infrastructure to allow your connection. The minute you have to pay for a new provision the costs skyrocket. This site is very good. There is a huge amount of information here already to look up and digest, and there are people here who can help with your own specific questions in pretty much every area of self building. Just keep asking (with a post in the appropriate forum ...) as this may well help you avoid expensive mistakes or give you options to think about that you may not have considered before. It's very easy to make a mistake, get taken for a ride, or simply be faced with not knowing what to do next and this forum can help with pretty much everything.

....."I can't believe its not butter.....ed" Laid with a Cobra more like!

Just found this on ebay https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/123282794794?ViewItem=&item=123282794794 I await a delivery quite from them.

Here are the floor plans. 1120 - 103DIMS - Bagber Farm Cottage - PROPOSED GROUND FLOOR.PDF 1120 - 104DIMS - Bagber Farm Cottage - PROPOSED GROUND FLOOR.PDF

The ground floor is about 180 square metres, 120 upstairs. We told the architect that we wanted larger rooms, not more rooms, and the downstairs is very open plan.

The guy who is currently doing my stove install came and put the bit through the roof in place 18 months ago, so the roofers could fit a lead flashing, and that's how it stayed until this weekend. On the subject of airtightness though, I'm concerned I've made a massive oversight by installing a stove. I got a room-sealed wood burner and put in an external air supply under the floor, but the installer is telling me that the penetrations between floors need to be ventilated (ground floor to first floor, first floor to loft). This effectively gives me a ventilation shaft linking my warm, airtight ground floor to the open air.... I naively didn't expect around the flue to be the leaky bit. Surely there's a better solution than this?

So if it's a flat roof why do they need a full height scaffold?? They can easily use the trestles at full height to spread the roof joists and set up the ply/OSB roof covering. Or maybe they aren't allowed to work of trestles.

This might sound a strange idea but it’s based on a substation we built under power lines. Due to clearance issues we couldn’t erect scaffold, so we did as described above.

Instead of a truss roof would a flat roof solve the height issue. The walls can be put up inside as normal then joists from the inside as well of trestles. Easy job then to sheet the roof out and cover it with what ever finish you choose.

You could erect the roof trusses, complete with tiles and gutter etc on the garage slab, then jack it up to the correct height and build the walls up to meet the roof.

@vivienz when I was speaking to PYC about scaffolding, they mentioned that they can erect a single story without scaffolding if needed, using a fork lift or something similar, and could place other safety features, such as crash mats and air safety mattresses, to protect any workers working at height without scaffolding. Hope you can find a similar solution. Great photos!

@lizzie, I checked with the missus - turns out she made a mistake inputting the order! No biggie - the spare shelves we have now can be used in the wardrobe for which we're about to submit another order.

9.5m x 5m is not "large-ish" - that's a properly large space, and the ceiling height needs to be proportionate imo. Forget 2100 and 2400 imo. We have 2850 ceilings downstairs, and I wouldn't go much less than that in a reasonably large area. If you go for a touch over 3000, you can use 600 wide boards in conjunction with standard boards to reduce cutting. A friend of ours has 2400 ceiling heights in their new large open plan kitchen and dining area and I think it feels claustrophobic.

Same place Herb mentioned above: aplaceforeverything.co.uk/elfa My wife said they were very helpful and made a couple of useful suggestions. One minor thing: we ordered two different shelf sizes, and only one was delivered. My wife is contacting them today to discuss - will let you know how we get on.

I had a 150mm service void all across the ground floor, that increased to 250mm in areas of lowered ceiling, features to break up the large kitchen/living/dining, room. This provided space for MVHR, cables...... Lighting I put LED ribbons (my electrician) around the dropped parts to provide lighting with some spots. The LED ribbons work very well.

...............with integrated rise and fall biscuit holder and whacka-plate mode?

You'd try and make a lunar space shuttle if someone asked you to That resin stuff is not for the feint hearted.

No I don't think you use that sort of flashing with a twin wall flue pipe. This is what you want https://www.flue-pipes.com/flashing-30-254.html flue-pipes.com is where I got mine from, the cheapest I could find. Depending how air tight and how well insulated you are building, you might want to look for a stove that takes it's combustion air direct from the outside via a duct rather than from the room.

@Thedreamer You could buy one of these lead flashings and get the roofers to fit it now. You'll need to check with the stove supplier to find out the diameter of the eventual stove pipe that they will be fitting so that you can correctly size the diameter of the lead flashing. The stove pipe will pass through it and they will install a weather skirt at the junction. The lead flashings are available in a variety of sizes. If you want a stove pipe without any bends it will also be important to very precise with the location of the lead flashing. https://www.roofingsuperstore.co.uk/product/6-lead-roofing-slate-450mm-x-450mm-x-45-degree.html?gclid=CjwKCAjwwJrbBRAoEiwAGA1B_T59_q_aZ-zcEN0Q3W33OElZ6cpUSJqX5FjKsh3wwMYmFJIHcBsv3RoCpjcQAvD_BwE For a 5" stove pipe you'll need a 6" flashing

check with your Hetas guy too. Like gas men some are really picky about what they'll connect to- will he be able to check distance to combustibles etc after you've completed the roof?

I watched this series back in 2016 and have just finished watching it again, some interesting ideas. https://www.channel4.com/programmes/inside-out-homes

Mine is grey. All of them are grey. And anybody who disagrees gets concrete boots and a deep garden pond.

Boll@cks! ALWAYS read the instructions... Seems I SHOULD have back buttered the tiles! >300x300 and where dampness likely after tiling... Too late now.

5" stove will need to step up to a 5" twinwall which is more than 5" Have a look at Flue Supplies who know their stuff - think @ProDave used them

Yup. Just allows to to scrub all the grout out that you just spent ages putting in I once spoke to a wise old tiler, a bit like Mr Miyagi off the filum "Katate Kid". His wise words, spoken softly. His warm breath on my neck.....hang on, that's the wife after 50 shades ? "Let the grout go off a bit, then hand sponge it with a reasonably damp but not dripping sponge, going at 45 degrees to the grout lines and NOT with them. Then once you've done a m2 you LIGHTLY run the damp CLEAN sponge with the lines to take out the grain pressing lightly. After that you retire for Saki, and 30 minutes later you get a soaking wet janitors mop and clean everything, mopping at 45 degrees to the grout lines. Finish the edges with the sponge and smirk to yourself as you'll have finished a couple of hours before the mere mortals with no mop". He was right, and that's how I've grouted ever since. Praise the lord.

will look nice with a pale grey grout...

Just to show I've got a fall:

Wet sponge and a bucket of water to wash the joints clean. It should come off easy. Spot on with the spacers. And Capt BigBalls wanted to tile it all in one go .

I briefly popped out to the site this afternoon, dragging hubby with me so that I could show him that I really am spending all that money getting a house built and not squirreling it away into a running away fund. The MBC team were busy constructing the ring beams that then get tied into the piles. Lots and lots of work in this and so they reckon that THE SLAB POUR WILL BE EITHER WEDNESDAY OR THURSDAY now. No photos today, but I'll take plenty tomorrow for another blow by blow account.

Alwyas butter when it's a floor, even more so if it's heated. Even MORE so if it's wetroom.

As an aside I'm building in block so have no vested interest in TF one way or the other. I just so happen to be argumentative and stubborn ?so will throw out a counter argument if I disagree with something - no offence is ever intended though!?

I’m going to sit my kids down and tell them that because the elderly and the boomers spunked away everything that had, they’ve left us a legacy of deteriorating national infrastructure. So, although they live in a place that is depressingly wet for 99% of their lives they will no longer be able to play with water during the best summer holiday weather they will have in their childhood. Many thanks.

Just accepted an offer for £285K, cash buyer, no chain, no mortgage, can complete the purchase in around 6 weeks. Looks like our strategy of pricing low and asking for offers in excess of the minimum price achieved a sale price that I suspect is higher than we'd have got by asking for a higher price and negotiating down. Just off to open a bottle of wine...

Once the waters hot, thats it. With PV you can still heat the water via an immersion, and then it can go on to offset your electricity consumption. ST cannot.

Thanks to you all I'm feeling almost confident about fitting these POSIs. Thanks very much everyone. By the way: I often cite the facts, or techniques or options contained in posts made on BH . Most often I get " T'aint dun like vat rewn 'ere " Tickety Boo, I say.

You can use any thickness of the marmox, dependant on how much insulation/VCL effect you want from the product, obviously the thicker it is the better, but all thicknesses are suitable for tile finish. You don't need any tanking with Marmox, its ready to use once fixed, and is far less vapour open than the other products mentioned, which do let water vapour through despite being waterproof.